‘Baby Falak’ Chapter 2: A New Life Unravels

[This Wall Street Journal reconstruction is running in serialized form. A new chapter will be posted each morning this week on India Real Time. Read Chapters One , Three, Four, Five and Six.]

Sanjit Das/Panos

Harpal Singh would appear to be a young man of some prospects, a good catch. In 2007, he graduated with a degree in economics and political science from a college in Jhunjhunu, a town in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, near where he lives with his parents and brother. He has trained to be an electrician but farms wheat and mustard seed on his family land. He owns a tractor and earns up to 20,000 rupees ($360) a month. The family are Jaats, conservative Hindus.

Harpal Singh’s yard

But Mr. Singh also can cite the problem that prompted him to jump at the chance, no questions asked, of marrying Munni Khatoon, the young woman from Bihar who was sent to be his bride: There aren’t enough local women for the local men to marry.

It is the effect of decades of parents favoring male children over female. It is a problem across much of India. Girl fetuses have been so frequently aborted that sex determination during pregnancy is illegal. But feticide is still rampant in many communities. Locals in the area where Mr. Singh lives say they can just go to Jhunjhunu and dispose of unborn girls.

Overall, there are 926 women in Rajasthan for every 1,000 men, according to the 2011 census. That’s a slight narrowing of the gap from a decade ago. But the gap for children under six years old has widened, to 883 girls for every 1,000 boys from 909 girls in 2001.

Boys are prized for their earning potential and because, by tradition, they inhabit and inherit the family home. A girl is expected to move in with her in-laws once she is married. The gap in numbers has created a bride shortage in Rajasthan – and a market for young women brought in from other states.

“I know there aren’t many girls available for marriage in Rajasthan,” Mr. Singh said in an interview. Ms. Khatoon was introduced to him as a Hindu virgin called Anita even though she was a Muslim mother of three. Mr. Singh says the man who played a role in arranging the marriage was his cousin, Amar, who lives nearby.

On the basis of seeing Ms. Khatoon’s photo, Mr. Singh agreed to pay, initially a fee of 200,000 rupees (about $3,600) that later was bumped up by another 75,000 rupees (about $1,360.)

He says he gave the money to Amar after being told that Anita’s uncle, who was said to live in a Rajasthani village, needed bail money to get out of jail.

Amar Singh agrees Harpal paid for Anita. But he says he didn’t receive any of the payment. “I didn’t take money from him for his marriage nor did I know the girl before his marriage,” Amar said.

Harpal Singh

The wedding was set for Sept. 1, barely three weeks after Ms. Khatoon left her relatives in rural Bihar, a state on the other side of the country.

The day before the marriage, Mr. Singh organized a “daawat,” a huge wedding feast, for 2,000 relatives, friends and others in his community. It cost him 80,000 rupees ($1,450.) “Naturally, I was happy and excited about the marriage,” he said in an interview. After all, “you don’t marry every day.”

The following morning, in two Tavera jeeps, relatives and friends set out for the drive from Jhunjhunu to Rohtak, a town in the neighboring state of Haryana where the wedding was to be held.

Mr. Singh is tall and stick thin. He towered over his new wife. In their wedding photos, her face is compact, his is a collection of prominent features — jug ears, strong eyebrows, and a thin, dapper moustache. He wore a shiny royal blue suit, a matching tie, and a red and gold patterned turban. Her head was covered with a traditional scarf.

Harpal Singh with Munni Khatoon

The venue was owned by Saroj Chaudhary, a middle-aged woman who walked with a slight limp, Mr. Singh’s family members recall.

Laxmi Devi, the woman who sent Ms. Khatoon from Delhi as the bride, said in a later police confession that Ms. Chaudhary was party to the ruse. Ms. Chaudhary could not be reached. Police say she is on the run; they have issued a warrant for her arrest.

**

The red soil of the Rajasthan countryside that the newlyweds rode through on the way to Harpal Singh’s house is billiard-table flat and pocked with short trees. Then, near Jhunjhunu, the landscape becomes more undulating and more sandy, a sign of the nearness of the Thar Desert. It is white hot.

At the top of a small rise is the Singh house. It is an L-shaped building with four bedrooms, a porch, a forecourt and a large yard that holds farm equipment. It is painted pale indigo — the ancient color of Rajasthan. Though basic, it has an occasional design flourish and a satellite television. Some members of the family, though Hindu, follow a Sikh spiritual leader called Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj.

The Singh house

The couple moved into a bedroom with three wood-framed beds and a view over the fields.

At last, Mr. Singh had a wife.

They ate at hotels in Jhunjhunu. He treated her well, they both say. She was cordial with the family and cooked good vegetables and bread.

But she was also frequently aloof and depressed. She would spend time on the roof, looking at the panoramic vista.

She had expected Ms. Chaudhary, who hosted the wedding, to visit within three weeks, in accordance with Hindu custom. But Ms. Chaudhary never showed, she says. And as the days passed, the magnitude of what Munni Khatoon had done crept up on her.

To make the wedding happen and maintain the fiction she was a virgin, she had handed over custody of her three small kids to people she barely knew.

She says she did it because she didn’t know what lay ahead for her, or them. And she says she trusted Ms. Devi, who told her they would be reunited before long. But their absence stung. “I used to remain unwell and used to cry remembering my kids,” she said of her first weeks of marriage. She didn’t know then that they would never all be together again.

**

Laxmi Devi’s house

Khusboo, her four-year-old daughter, hadn’t made it to Delhi. Ms. Khatoon says she left her with Laxmi Devi’s adult daughter to be looked after in Muzaffarpur in Bihar. Ms. Devi’s daughter couldn’t be reached.

Before long, however, Khusboo was living with strangers in a nearby slum, a 20-foot-by-six-foot space that boasts a water pipe but otherwise is strewn with trash, flies and filth. The brick wall that sections off the bedroom has a large, almost-circular hole, like a cannonball hit it.

The 70-year-old woman who lives there says her son, Ghanti Mistry, a van driver in the neighborhood, found the girl crying by a nearby Hindu temple. When no-one claimed her, he brought her home as his own, his mother says. His wife had left him two years before, she says, and he wanted a child.

Ghanti Mistry’s mother

“I kept her and fed her well,” the mother said in an interview. But the family knew what they should have done: “She was a missing child, so we should have reported her to the police,” said the mother. Her son, Mr. Mistry, 30 years old, couldn’t be reached for comment.

**

The other two children – Golu, a five-year-old boy, and Sania, an 18-month-old girl – stayed at Laxmi Devi’s house in Uttam Nagar in Delhi, according to several accounts.

The neighborhood is like dozens across the city, thriving and clogged. Buildings on the main thoroughfare are three stories high; some have mirrored blue windows. There is a Yamaha scooter showroom, a hookah café, a Baskin Robbins stand, and a billboard that offers call center training and “personality development.”

About half a kilometer off this main road is the house where the children were put up. It is yellow, with brown metal doors and window frames. An internal staircase, visible from the street, leads to a flat roof.

In mid-August, word spread that there was a boy in the neighborhood whose mother was looking for someone to care for him.

Mohammed Sakil, a itinerant garment seller who lives nearby, heard it from his friend Manoj Kumar Nandan, who did odd jobs in the house where the boy was staying, according to several accounts. Mr. Sakil couldn’t be reached.

“Do you want a son?” Mr. Sakil’s wife says he asked her one day. They have three daughters, aged 18, 12 and nine.

She said yes.

“I have got a boy,” he told her.

“It’s good if we can get a recently born child,” she suggested.

Aashma Begum, far left

He said the boy was five. His wife said go ahead anyway. In a meeting between Mr. Sakil and Ms. Khatoon to arrange the handover, he asked for something signed, Ms. Khatoon says. She says she refused. He acquiesced — and walked off with Golu. His wife noted the day he arrived in her diary.

“Everybody wants a son,” the wife, Aashma Begum, 35, said in an interview. “These daughters go to the houses of their husbands after marriage. If I have a son, he will bring a daughter-in-law and they will look after us when we are old.”

Mr. Sakil couldn’t be reached. He told Ms. Begum only that he got the boy from a friend, she says.

The family lives in a warren of shared rooms. They keep chickens (the girls keep one colored bright green, just for fun), a goat, and two white pet rats (because they supposedly keep the other rats away.)

The boy was welcomed. The girls played with him. “We also want to have a brother,” said Yashmin, the 18-year-old daughter.

Golu was well-behaved but restless, the family says. He watched cartoons as soon as he awoke – “Doraemon” and “Oggy and the Cockroaches.” He called the adults “mommy” and “papa” and occasionally demanded of them, “Give me one rupee.” He’d take it to buy a toffee at the store. Ms. Begum says she told people in the neighborhood he was her son. The boy said nothing of his mother, sisters, or Bihar, she says. When they asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said “Policeman.”

Sania, Ms. Khatoon’s baby girl, stayed the longest in the Uttam Nagar house. A neighbor remembers seeing, from her balcony, a small baby playing on the roof next door.

Sania was cared for by Ms. Devi’s cook, Pratima Devi Chatterjee. Ms. Chatterjee, a 55-year-old, fair-skinned Bengali with burn marks on her left hand, has three kids of her own. She and Mr. Nandan, the odd jobs man, are an item, Ms. Chatterjee says.

Ms. Chatterjee says she called the baby “Babu,” an affectionate term for a kid.

“You feed her food and milk in time and she would play on her own and sleep,” Ms. Chatterjee said in an interview. “She was very close to me.”

One day, in the autumn, she says Laxmi Devi, her boss, told her: “I can’t be looking after this child and her mother hasn’t returned, so take her with you.” Ms. Devi couldn’t be reached.

Mr. Nandan once again found the solution. In addition to doing odd jobs at the house, he drove a taxi. The man who owned the cab was looking for a child.

Later, in the newspapers and in police statements, that man would be called Rajkumar. But, at the time, most people knew him as Mohammed Dilshad, a man in his early thirties who had moved to Delhi a decade before and started driving an auto rickshaw. He often ferried prostitutes around town.

He made enough to purchase a car to use as a taxi. He and his wife paid 8,000 rupees ($145) in monthly rent for a three-bedroom, one-story house in Dwarka, an area on the western reaches of Delhi. He bought a second cab. They were up and comers, of sorts.

Their two-year-old son suffered brain damage, the boy’s mother said in an interview, and is cared for mostly by his grandparents near Mumbai. The couple wanted another kid, according to the boy’s mother and a statement Mr. Dilshad later gave police. He could not be reached.

Courtesy ZIPNet

Baby Falak

Adopting Sania was the answer. One autumn evening around 8 p.m., Ms. Chatterjee and Mr. Nandan took the girl to Dwarka, Ms. Chatterjee says.

“Keep her well,” she told Mr. Dilshad. The couple decided to rename her Falak, Urdu for “Sky.”

**

In Jhunjhunu, Harpal Singh was starting to wonder about his new, sad wife. He noticed that when they went to bed, she made sure the lights were off. And she wasn’t getting pregnant. Ms. Khatoon told him she had had an appendectomy, so conceiving was a challenge.

After several weeks, Mr. Singh took her to a hospital for a check-up. A doctor explained to him that his wife had a tubal ligation and could not conceive. Mr. Singh confronted Ms. Khatoon. She confessed. She told him about Bihar, her previous marriage, her three kids.

A bedroom in the Singh house

He was devastated. He moved into a separate bedroom. But he was too ashamed to tell his relatives. Ms. Khatoon, her cover blown, called Ms. Chaudhary, the woman who was instrumental in marrying her off.

According to Ms. Khatoon, Ms. Chaudhary advised her to steal all the money and jewelry she could find in the house and escape. Ms. Khatoon refused and told Mr. Singh about it, both say.

“I don’t want to do that because if I go back to Saroj, she will again sell me to some other men,” Ms. Khatoon told her husband. “I just want to go back to my kids.’”

**

Tomorrow: How Falak came to be cared for by a 14-year-old with a turbulent childhood and a history of sexual abuse who had run away from home six months before. On Monday, you’re invited to join a live chat with Paul Beckett and Krishna Pokharel as they discuss the series, the social issues raised, and the individuals profiled herein. Ask questions now, and join us on Monday.

**

[This story was compiled through dozens of interviews, court documents, police records, medical records and counseling reports. Several of the principal characters are speaking here for the first time. Living minors are identified by their nicknames in accordance with India’s child-protection guidelines. All photographs by Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett unless otherwise specified.]